"Bric-a-brac" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... for a free-for-all fight. Del Mar and Smith leaped at the intruder. Over and over they rolled, breaking furniture, overturning and smashing bric-a-brac. ...
— The Romance of Elaine • Arthur B. Reeve
... bordered by stately old Spanish mansions, many of them still occupied by their Castilian owners, the Yankee invaders wandered at will, brimful of curiosity and good nature, eager to gather in acquaintance, information, and bric-a-brac, making themselves perfectly at home, filling the souls of the late lords of the soil with disdain, and those of the natives with wonderment through their lavish, jovial, free and easy ways. Within a month from the time Merritt's little division had marched into the city, Manila was ...
— Ray's Daughter - A Story of Manila • Charles King
... French! I know. Among the bric-a-brac of my heart I still cherish some of those little slips of paper with which we made ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne
... through that?" asked Madeline, pointing to the miscellaneous assortment of books, papers, dance-cards and bric-a-brac that littered Betty's small desk to the point of ...
— Betty Wales Senior • Margaret Warde
... Hon. Slote will add much to the gaiety of nations. The distinctive articles of his attire were a red cravat, a coat of the vintage of '49, a tobacco-stained shirt-front and a whisp of oakum- colored chin beard. As a bit of bric-a-brac, or a curio from one of the oldest portions of the unhallowed west, he will be of value in the interior decoration of the Capitol, but it is to be feared that his oratorical vent has been choked up for ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... of the many straggling streets, almost hidden behind a few large shops of curious build, stood a small boutique full of ancient relics and jeweled bric-a-brac. ...
— Dyke Darrel the Railroad Detective - Or, The Crime of the Midnight Express • Frank Pinkerton
... carefully dust and wipe first with a damp and then with a dry cloth all the little articles of bric-a-brac, vases, small pictures, and curios, which we prize because they are pretty, after which she sets them in a closet or drawer quite out of the way. Then, with a soft cloth fastened over the broom, she has the walls wiped down, and with a hair brush which comes for the purpose she ...
— Holiday Stories for Young People • Various
... it is a very good germicide; (3) it has no injurious effect upon fabrics and objects; (4) it does not change colors; and (5) it can be used for the disinfection of rooms with the richest hangings, bric-a-brac, etc., without danger to these. Formaldehyde is evolved either from paraform or from the liquid formalin; formerly it was also obtained by the action of wood-alcohol vapor upon ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume V (of VI) • Various
... of rich things in his shack; of Persian rugs and antique jugs and costly bric-a-brac. There's art work in the hall, fine paintings on the wall; and yet a gloom as of the tomb is hanging over all. Here costly books abound. "This cost a thousand pound; that trade-mark blur means Elzivir—I've nothing cheap around. Here's Venus in the foam; the statue came from Rome; ...
— Rippling Rhymes • Walt Mason
... ventured to peep through the straw and hay. What he saw was a small square room filled with pots and pans, pictures, carvings, old blue jugs, old steel armor, shields, daggers, Chinese idols, Vienna china, Turkish rugs, and all the art lumber and fabricated rubbish of a bric-a-brac dealer's. It seemed a wonderful place to him; but, oh! was there one drop of water in it all? That was his single thought; for his tongue was parching, and his throat felt on fire, and his chest began to be dry and choked as ...
— Bimbi • Louise de la Ramee
... walls were tasteful reproductions of her favorite old masters. The excellence of her education was attested not by the books and pictures but by the absence of those fussy, commonplace draperies and bits of bric-a-brac where—with people of no taste and no imagination furnish their houses because they can think of nothing else ...
— The Conflict • David Graham Phillips
... of luxury, evidenced by the rich carpets, elegant pieces of furniture, paintings of well-known artists and beautiful bric-a-brac ...
— Twenty Years of Hus'ling • J. P. Johnston
... porch and passed through the wide hall into the shaded spaciousness of the drawing-room. In that quiet interior light that rested softly upon the decorous portraits of his forebears, the mahogany, and the accumulated bric-a-brac of three generations, he became aware of the incongruous presence of Stella. He realized again her clean-cut, finished daintiness, the incisiveness of voice and feature. As he released her hand, still aware of its hard, boyish grip, he heard his aunt's voice, light, ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... and there—like your bric-a-brac?" suggested Stuyvesant. "But what are these alluring adventures of yours that stretched through the ages and across ...
— Tales of Fantasy and Fact • Brander Matthews
... poor imitations does not end in the girl's life with her clothes. When she marries, she carries it into her home. Decoration, not furnishing, is the keynote of all she touches. It is she who is the best patron of the elaborate and monstrous cheap furniture, rugs, draperies, crockery, bric-a-brac, which fill the shops of the cheaper quarters of the great cities, and usually all quarters ...
— The Business of Being a Woman • Ida M. Tarbell
... pick of youth at the beck of her smile-Fleur incomparable! It was an evil moment. Jon, however, had a great idea that one must be able to face anything. And he braced himself with that dour refection in front of a bric-a-brac shop. At this high-water mark of what was once the London season, there was nothing to mark it out from any other except a grey top hat or two, and the sun. Jon moved on, and turning the corner into Piccadilly, ran into Val ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... wiedersehen, I fear, with his Highness," Miss Vance said, folding the note pensively. She had not meant to drive a marriage bargain, and yet—to have placed a pupil upon even such a bric-a-brac throne as that of Wolfburgh! She looked thoughtfully at Lucy's chubby cheeks. A princess? The man was not objectionable in himself, either—a kindly, overgrown boy. "He told me," said Jean, "that he was going to a house ...
— Frances Waldeaux • Rebecca Harding Davis
... the trunks of full-grown trees. On two of the spits were long rows of fowl and legs of mutton roasting; the great chains were being slowly turned by a chef in the paper cap of his profession. In deep burnished brass bowls lay water-cresses; in Caen dishes of an age to make a bric-a-brac collector turn green with envy, a Bearnaise sauce was being beaten by another gallic master-hand. Along the beams hung old Rouen plates and platters; in the numberless carved Normandy cupboards gleamed rare bits of Delft and Limoges; the walls may be said to have been ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... a moment. We must take the bric-a-brac from the top of it before you touch it. If there are two incompatible things in this world, ...
— The Bicyclers and Three Other Farces • John Kendrick Bangs
... that most of their shops, or "stores," as we say in America, are for selling bric-a-brac, toys, lacquer ware, bronzes, or ornamental things of one kind or another; but perhaps this is largely because they give an artistic or ornamental appearance to a thousand utensils and household articles which in America would be raw and plain in their obvious practicality. The ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... It was de trop—"matter out of place"—an impertinence. The gem was unworthy of the setting. Even the barbarous taste of our time and country, which had loaded the walls of the room with pictures, the floor with furniture, and the furniture with bric-a-brac, had not quite fitted the place for this bit of the savage life of the jungle. Besides—insupportable thought!—the exhalations of its breath mingled with the atmosphere which he ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... "living-room" of a family to whom the shelved volumes are indeed sealed. Thus it was with Sheridan, who read nothing except newspapers, business letters, and figures; who looked upon books as he looked upon bric-a-brac or crocheting—when he was at home, and not abed or eating, ...
— The Turmoil - A Novel • Booth Tarkington
... Perhaps the appearance of comfort was heightened by the general air of subdued luxury that pervaded the apartment into which Dr. Buxton had been ushered. The draperies, the arrangement of the little affairs that answer to the name of bric-a-brac, the adjustment of the furniture—everything—conveyed the impression of peace and repose; and the chief element of this perfect harmony was Miss Eustis herself, who rose to greet the doctor as he entered. She regarded the physician with eyes that somehow seemed to be wise and kind, and ...
— Free Joe and Other Georgian Sketches • Joel Chandler Harris
... her with interest and approval. He was a plump rosy man of the blond Jewish type, with smart London clothes fitting him like upholstery, and small sidelong eyes which gave him the air of appraising people as if they were bric-a-brac. He glanced up interrogatively at ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... receptacle for the family golf-balls, much to the trepidation of his good wife, who considered that the vase, like some women, had in its beauty a sufficient cause for existence, and who would have preferred going without golf forever to the destruction of her treasured bit of bric-a-brac. ...
— The Booming of Acre Hill - And Other Reminiscences of Urban and Suburban Life • John Kendrick Bangs
... from the Society of Engineers of Japan, and a striking desk-set of writing apparatus from Krupp, all the pieces being made out of tiny but massive guns and shells of Krupp steel. In addition to such bric-a-brac and bibelots of all kinds are many pictures and photographs, including the original sketches of the reception given to Edison in 1889 by the Paris Figaro, and a letter from Madame Carnot, placing the Presidential opera-box at the disposal of Mr. and Mrs. Edison. One of the ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... her chamber window, looking out at black sea and blacker sky. Exquisite pictures, wonderful bric-a-brac treasures, inlaid tables and cabinets, richest carpets and curtains, and chairs that were like ivory touched up with gold, made the ...
— The Baronet's Bride • May Agnes Fleming
... queried Frederik, puzzled. "Oh—you mean all this junk?" with a comprehensive hand wave that included Dutch clock, Dutch warming pans, Dutch bric-a-brac, and Dutch furniture. "This junk all over the house? Oh, I'll have it carted to the nearest ash heap. It isn't worth a red ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm - Novelised From the Play • David Belasco
... to buy books, music, artistic bric-a-brac, or what not, she will find the big store displaying and selling all these things on commission for the municipal or private producers all over ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... weird little glass statuette among the usual bric-a-brac. It rather resembled a ground hog, had seven fingers on each of its six limbs, and smiled up at him ...
— The Perfectionists • Arnold Castle
... few pieces of furniture and bric-a-brac that Harvey could claim as his own. He stared gloomily at the floor for a long time, thinking. Of what use were they to him now? And where was he to put them in case he ...
— What's-His-Name • George Barr McCutcheon
... Councils!—the unbroken unity of essential dogma. But you"—he turned with renewed passion on his companion—"what have you done with the Creeds? Every word in them steeped in the heart's blood of generations!—and you put them aside as a kind of theological bric-a-brac that concerns us no more. Meynell!—you have no conception of the forces that this movement of yours, if you persist in it, will unchain against you! You are like children playing with ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... artificial, modern life. Suppose that instead of increasing their wants and their desires, instead of loading themselves down on life's journey with so many bags and parcels and boxes of superfluous luggage and bric-a-brac that they are forced to sit down by the roadside and gasp for breath, instead of wearing themselves out in the dusty ways of ostentation and vain show or embittering their hearts because they can not succeed in getting into the ...
— Joy & Power • Henry van Dyke
... Ainos of Yezo and Saghalin the medicine-man or shaman is decorated with fetichistic bric-a-brac of all sorts, and these bits of shells, metals, and other clinking substances are believed to be media of communication with mysterious influences and forces. In Korea thousands of trees bedecked ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... porcelain figure or statuette of lion, or stag, or Indian hunter—and a very choice statuette too—appropriate for the rosewood or marble bracket of parlor or library; never the animal itself, or the hunter himself. Indeed, who wants the real animal or hunter? What would that do amid astral and bric-a-brac and tapestry, and ladies and gentlemen talking in subdued tones of Browning and Longfellow and art? The least suspicion of such actual bull, or Indian, or of Nature carrying out itself, would put all those good people ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... and the less, because, to Adams, everything French was bad except the restaurants, while the continuous life in England made French art seem worst of all. This did not prove that English art, in 1866, was good; far from it; but it helped to make bric-a-brac of all art, after ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... young and beautiful lay dying. The room in which she lay was magnificent in its costly hangings; the lace draperies that hung from the windows represented a fortune, the carpets and rugs which covered the floor were of the costliest description. Rare paintings and the richest of bric-a-brac occupied the walls and other available places. Even the lace counterpane on the bed represented the expenditure of a vast sum of money. But the woman who lay moaning there in mortal pain would have given all to have purchased one hour ...
— Jolly Sally Pendleton - The Wife Who Was Not a Wife • Laura Jean Libbey
... likes it or not. After all, nobody seems to care much, nowadays," she added in a tone of reflection. "It is only the idea I always heard that Volterra kept a pawnshop in Florence, and then became a dealer in bric-a-brac, and afterwards a banker, and all sorts of things. But it may not be true, and after all, it is only prejudice. A banker may be a ...
— The Heart of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... Potts out upon the turnpike, taking a walk; and I joined him. As we proceeded he became rather confidential. The subject of the mania for collecting bric-a-brac came up; and after an expression of opinion from me respecting the matter, Mr. Potts told the story of his wife's fondness for that kind ...
— Elbow-Room - A Novel Without a Plot • Charles Heber Clark (AKA Max Adeler)
... the city of New York an odd piece of bric-a-brac which I am sometimes tempted to wish was in my own possession. On a bracket in Edwin Booth's bedroom at The Players—the apartment remains as he left it that solemn June day ten years ago—stands a sadly dilapidated skull which the elder Booth, and afterward his son Edwin, used to ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... whose benefit the various articles of bric-a-brac in his father's drawing-room relate stories appropriate to their several native countries, exclaims at the conclusion of one of them: 'I almost think there can't be a better one than that!' the reader, of whatever age, will probably feel inclined to agree with him. Upon the whole, it is to ...
— Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy • Frank Richard Stockton
... sketched something more like a palace than a country-house. Lawson was by no means a luxurious man. At present he was well content with a Wolseley valise, and shaved cheerfully out of a tin mug. It struck me as odd that a man so simple in his habits should have so sumptuous a taste in bric-a-brac. I told myself, as I turned in, that the Saxon mother from the Midlands had done little to dilute the strong wine ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... mastery in the voice, as all women do respond when the voice is the right one; and a soft wave of colour swept from chin to brow as she turned from the gate, and walked through the doorway straight to her bedroom; while her future lord pranced furiously among the bric-a-brac, and her aunt's beads and bracelets clashed against the china as she wrung her hands over the tea things, and ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... attracted the attention of the thinking men of the world. And it is even now serving as a model upon which our entire public-school system will yet be founded—a system that works not for culture, for bric-a-brac purposes, but for character and competence. A what-not education may be impressive, but is worthless as collateral. The achievements of Peter Cooper make the average successful ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... happened to him. Let a gold watch be discovered by a supposititious man who has never heard of watches. He has a sense of beauty. He admires the watch, and takes pleasure in it. He says: "This is a beautiful piece of bric-a-brac; I fully appreciate this delightful trinket." Then imagine his feelings when someone comes along with the key; imagine the light flooding his brain. Similar incidents occur in the eventful life of the constant reader. ...
— Literary Taste: How to Form It • Arnold Bennett
... process of comparison I have decided that jars and vases having floral decorations themselves are wholly unsuitable for holding flowers. They should be cherished as bric-a-brac, when they are worthy specimens of the art of potter and painter, but as receptacles for flowers they have no use beyond holding sprays of beautiful foliage or silver-green ...
— The Garden, You, and I • Mabel Osgood Wright
... the style of Bach, Schubert, and Mendelssohn fighting that of Wagner and Bruckner; and, by a decided liking for canon form, it even recalls some of Franck's work. The whole is like a showy and expensive collection of bric-a-brac. ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... though of the demi-monde, lived like a princess, cultivated letters and art, and had many poets as well as many nobles among her friends. Her floors were carpeted with velvet rugs, her walls hung with golden cloth, and her tables loaded with costly bric-a-brac. The Spanish courtier suddenly turned and spat copiously in the face of his lackey and then explained to the slightly startled company that he chose this objective rather than soil the splendor he saw around him. The disgusting ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... down. There was a rug on the floor, now thick with mould, and yet it was a rare Aubusson rug with sturdy cupids trailing flowery vines across its surface. There were pieces of broken furniture and bric-a-brac strewn ...
— The Campfire Girls on the Field of Honor • Margaret Vandercook
... upon earth, it was to serve and to glorify and to protect you and your radiant sisterhood that man consecrated his existence. You were beautiful, and you were frail; you were half goddess and half bric-a-brac. Ohime, I recognize the call of chivalry, and my heart-strings resound: yet, for innumerable reasons, I hesitate to take you for my wife, and to concede myself your appointed protector, responsible as such to Heaven. For one matter, I am not altogether sure that I am Heaven's vicar ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... have a compelling manner. He must be gabby and stentorian, witheringly sarcastic and plaintively cajoling. He must be able to detect the faintest symptoms of avarice and desire in the blink of an eyelid, in the tilt of a head. Behind his sing-song of patter as he knocks down a piece of useless bric-a-brac he must be able to remain cool, remain calculating, remain like a hawk prepared to pounce upon his prey. Passion for him must be no more than a mask; anger, sorrow, despair, ecstasy no more than the devices ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... us not fail to be duly grateful. Let us not fail to give thanks for the fact that setting forever is the conception of music as an after-dinner cordial, a box of assorted bonbons, bric-a-brac, a titillation, a tepid bath, a performance that amuses and caresses and whiles away a half-hour, an enchantment for boarding-school misses, an opportunity for virtuosi ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... of a liquor saloon. If we enter that young man's home what do we find? Perhaps on one of the side-walls, "What is home without a mother," on the altar the family Bible, every picture on the walls suggestive of home life and purity, every chair and piece of bric-a-brac linked with the sweet association of childhood, the conversation as pure as the sunlight on which the young man lives; yet he will kiss his mother, leave this home, and down the street make his way to a liquor saloon, where often vile pictures hang on the walls, cards lie on the table ...
— Wit, Humor, Reason, Rhetoric, Prose, Poetry and Story Woven into Eight Popular Lectures • George W. Bain
... domestic work of the best period, and the internal decoration and the furniture matched to a nicety the exterior. It was in that grave and silent abode, with Alresca, that I first acquired a taste for bric-a-brac. Ah! the Dutch marquetry, the French cabinetry, the Belgian brassware, the curious panellings, the oak-frames, the faience, the silver candlesticks, the Amsterdam toys in silver, the Antwerp incunables, and the famous tenth-century illuminated manuscript in half-uncials! ...
— The Ghost - A Modern Fantasy • Arnold Bennett
... little before midnight we stopped with a jerk and were told to "Aus." As I followed the others into a restaurant winter garden affair, five minutes after our arrival, I was delighted to hear several small gramophones already playing "Bric-a-brac" and other selections from musical comedies, each insisting that its was the only tune worth listening to. Owing to the conditions escape was out of the question; the Germans did not therefore worry much—in fact, ...
— 'Brother Bosch', an Airman's Escape from Germany • Gerald Featherstone Knight
... least as much a laughing matter as his own. But its oddities were of a different cast from those of our hero's gilded saloons on the Boulevard Haussmann: the place was low, dusky, contracted, and crowded with curious bric-a-brac. Bellegarde, penniless patrician as he was, was an insatiable collector, and his walls were covered with rusty arms and ancient panels and platters, his doorways draped in faded tapestries, his floors muffled in the skins of beasts. Here and there was one of those uncomfortable ...
— The American • Henry James
... the parlor but to the music-room, a large room on the opposite side of the hall, which Mrs. Ivy, a firm believer in the psychological effect of color, had fitted out in blue to induce a contemplative mood in the occupants. On the mantel and tables were the same miscellaneous collection of bric-a-brac that characterized the parlor. Several pictures of Gerald adorned the walls, the most imposing of which presented him seated at the piano, with his mother standing beside him, a rapt expression on her ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice
... in a very fashionable street, if I must confess it. There are many old houses in New York that have been abandoned by their owners because of the uptown movement and the west-side movement of fashion. These houses are as quaint in their antique interiors as a bric-a-brac cabinet. In an upper story of one of these subdivided houses Rob Riley and his wife, Henrietta, have two old-fashioned rooms; the front room is large and airy, with a carved mantelpiece, the back room small and cosy. ...
— Duffels • Edward Eggleston
... was heaped and crowded with all the riches the Boolooroo had accumulated during his reign of two or three hundred years. Piles of gold and jewels were on all sides, and precious ornaments and splendid cloths, rare pieces of carved furniture, vases, bric-a-brac and the like, were strewn about the room in ...
— Sky Island - Being the further exciting adventures of Trot and Cap'n - Bill after their visit to the sea fairies • L. Frank Baum
... saw in imagination the blending of the old carved oak furniture with his own pretty maple and rosewood. His artistic sense saw at once how the high dark chimney-pieces would glow and color with his bric-a-brac, and how his historical paintings would make the halls and stairways alive with old romance; and his copies of Turner and other landscapes ...
— The Measure of a Man • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... signs are a study, and if you are ignorant of the language, you ask your learned guide to interpret them for you. He will tell you that Hop Wo does business here as a grocer, that Shun Wo is the butcher, that Shan Tong is the tea-merchant, that Tin Yuk is the apothecary, and that Wo-Ki sells bric-a-brac. Some of the signs, your guide will tell you, are not the real names of the men who do business, that they are only mottoes. Wung Wo Shang indicates to you that perpetual concord begets wealth, Hip Wo speaks to you of brotherly love and harmony, Tin Yuk means a jewel from ...
— By the Golden Gate • Joseph Carey
... him as alcohol-soaked, poor white trash. She drove him out, and when he was gone she started to make their rooms presentable, with an energy she had not shown for months. She began to dust, to plan curtains for the room, to plan to hide the bric-a-brac, to plan to rent a typewriter and ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis |
